Frequently Asked Questions

Can I upgrade a Fedora 16 system with FedUp?

No, this is not currently possible. The FedUp client does not currently build or run on Fedora 16 and you need to be running at least Fedora 17 in order to run the client. If you are upgrading from Fedora 16, use Preupgrade to upgrade to Fedora 17 first.

How do I report issues that I find with upgrades?

First see Common F18 bugs#Upgrade_issues whether the problem is not one of a very prominent issue we already know of. If it is not there, the component for reporting problems depends on the exact issue that you hit:

Issues with upgrade preparation

If you hit issues when using the FedUp client (fedup) before reboot, search or file a bug against fedup using the version you are upgrading from.

Issues During Upgrade

If you hit issues after upgrade preparation and the initial reboot, search or file a bug against fedup-dracut using the version you are upgrading to.

Issues After Upgrade

If you hit issues after upgrade with a specific package, file a bug against the package with which you are having issues.

How do I Debug Issues During Upgrade

A troubleshooting and debug guide will be written soon and linked to from here.

Be sure to get the latest release, this may involve enabling updates-testing (yum --enablerepo=updates-testing install fedup in the command line)

There are three options for sourcing the packages needed for upgrade - using a network repository, a local ISO file or a local device (hard drive, optical disk etc.).

Network upgrade is strongly recommendedIt is strongly recommended to use the network upgrade instead of offline update modes (ISO, local device). Network upgrade will ensure you receive the latest packages from Fedora 18. If you use local media containing old Fedora 18 packages, you might end up with a mixture of Fedora 17 and Fedora 18 packages and the system might not work properly until you fully update it after reboot (if it boots at all).

Network

Using a network source is the easiest method of upgrading and will pull in updates while upgrading - eliminating the potential issue if your current system has a newer kernel version than the Fedora release to which you are upgrading.

Start the upgrade prep by executing following command

sudo fedup-cli --network 18 --debuglog fedupdebug.log

Once the preparations have completed, check the fedupdebug.log file if any errors show up in the output from fedup-cli

ISO File

In order to use an ISO file, it needs to exist locally on the filesystem of the system to be upgraded. The documentation is written as if that file is /home/user/fedora-18.iso but you will need to replace all instances of that path with the actual path of the ISO. Updates will be pulled in if you have network access on the machine to be upgraded.

Download the Fedora 26 ISO appropriate for the arch that you are running

For the sake of example, we will assume that the ISO exists at /home/user/fedora-18.iso but it can be anwhere in the filesystem as long as you alter the path below to reflect the actual location of the ISO.

Once the preparations have completed, check the fedupdebug.log file if any errors show up in the output from fedup-cli

Other Device

Optical drives and other mountable storage can also be used as a package source for upgrade preparations.

Mount the source material

For the sake of example, we will assume that this source is mounted at /mnt/fedora but you can mount it anywhere as long as you replace /mnt/fedora in the command below with the actual mounted location of the upgrade source.

Start the upgrade preparations by executing the following command

sudo fedup-cli --device /mnt/fedora --debuglog=fedupdebug.log

Once the preparations have completed, check the fedupdebug.log file if any errors show up in the output from fedup-cli

Executing the Upgrade

Needs ReferenceThis section still needs a reference to the 'esc kills plymouth' bug once a suitable summary has been written

Reboot the system if fedup has completed without error.

Once the system reboots, there should be a new entry in the GRUB menu titled System Upgrade.

If you add rd.upgrade.debugshell boot argument, you will get a login shell on VT2, allowing you to tinker with the system in case something goes wrong

Select the System Upgrade option from the GRUB menu

The system should boot into the upgrade process and a plymouth boot screen should be displayed

If you press 'esc', a more detailed log of progress will be desplayed but if you switch back to the graphical progress indicator, it will remain at 0% for the remainder of the upgrade but that does not mean the upgrade has stopped. See Need section reference here once it's written

Once the upgrade process has completed, the system will reboot and an option to boot Fedora 26 will be on the grub menu

GRUB Updates

Needs updateThis part of the documentation is updating.

Somewhat OptionalWhile updating GRUB on your upgraded system isn't strictly required, it is recommended for BIOS systems and very strongly recommended for UEFI systems due to the transition from grub-efi to grub2-efi

Updating GRUB2 (BIOS systems)

After upgrade, the grub2 you're booting from will still be the F17 version; upgrading must be done manually

Updating GRUB (UEFI systems)

Grub2 is not installed as part of the upgrade process, so you'll have to install it:

sudo yum install grub2-efi

Migrating Grub Configuration

Unfortunately, most boot settings are not migrated to grub2 without manual intervention. To migrate these settings, you will need to look the existing grub configuration to migrate settings. Open the /boot/efi/EFI/redhat/grub.conf and find the most recent boot entry. The version numbers don't need to exactly match the example, just find the most recent one.

non-us keymaps and languagesNeed to write docs on how to figure out the vconsole lang and keymap args

Take the kernel args that we extracted before and insert them inside the quotes following GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX. In this example, it would look like the following. Note that formatting has been slightly altered for the wiki - there should be no newlines in the text following GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX.

Updating the EFI boot entry

Once the grub2-efi package is installed, we need to add a new EFI boot entry. The easiest way to do this is to just modify the command used when Fedora was first installed. Note that you will not be using the exact same command when upgrading to grub2 as the location of some files has changed. The older reference command can be found in /var/log/anaconda/anaconda.program.log and should end with a command similar to:

Cleaning Up Post Upgrade

There are a collection of post-upgrade things to do. Some of which are fixed by doing a distro sync:

yum distribution-synchronization --disablepresto

If you are using google-chrome from the google repository, you must re-install google-chrome due to a packing bug on the Google side of things. Make sure to adjust the command to the build type you would like to install:

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